Implementing a Multitenant System using a Document-based NoSQL Database

Software- as-a-service applications in cloud computing are generally multitenant in nature. Higher performance gains can be expected if the underlying database of an application is also multi-tenant. Traditionally, relational databases have been utilized in shared-database and shared schema manner to store all tenants' data within the same tables of common database. This results in problems while extending or modifying an existing schema as well as inflexibility while retrieving a specific tenant's data. Therefore, this paper presents an approach whereby a document-oriented database system is used to implement multi-tenancy in SaaS applications. The proposed approach uses the flexibility of schema design in document databases along with the sharding feature to implement efficient tenant data storage while maintaining isolation between tenants. A case study is also presented to illustrate the proposed approach.